Monday, November 19, 2012

UNO Alumnus Patrick Scheuermann was named director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight
Center in Huntsville, Ala. In September 2012.

Patrick Scheuermann, a University of New Orleans alumnus and director of NASA's Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will serve as UNO's fall 2012 commencement
speaker. The ceremony will take place at 3 p.m. on Saturday, December 15 in the UNO
Lakefront Arena.

In September, Scheuermann was named director of the Marshall Center. He previously
served as director of the John C. Stennis Space Center in Hancock County, Miss. He
is a New Orleans native who earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from
UNO.

While at Stennis, Scheuermann provided executive leadership, overall direction and
management since being named director in 2010. He was responsible for implementing
NASA's mission in the area of rocket propulsion testing, and developing and maintaining
NASA's world-class rocket propulsion test facilities.

Scheuermann previously served as Stennis' deputy director and associate director,
in addition to working as chief operating officer of NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility
in New Orleans. Since joining NASA in 1988 as a propulsion test engineer, he worked
on numerous major test projects at Stennis, including serving as project manager for
NASA's Reusable Launch Vehicle program, a NASA-industry effort to develop a new generation
of safe and cost-effective rockets to send payloads to space.

Since it was established in 1960, the Marshall Center has used its engineering and
scientific expertise to build launch vehicles, spacecraft and scientific instruments
that enable the United States to explore and discover. Marshall also manages the Michoud
Assembly Facility, a state-of-the-art facility in New Orleans where the space shuttle
external tanks were built and which now will be used in the development of the next-generation
Space Launch System.